Resumen de Development and evaluation of smartphone-based its applications for vehicular networks
One of the research areas that is receiving a lot of attention recently is autonomous vehicles. Researchers are currently focused on the third level of autonomy out of the five levels, which are: drive assistance, partial automation, conditional automation, high automation, and full automation. Even though rapid progress is being made in this field, the adoption of these solutions will take time not only due to legal issues, but also due to the fact that technological improvements face slow endorsement by manufacturers. Also, the slow renewal rate of vehicles on road hinders the deployment of novel technologies, as is the case of Vehicular Networks (VNs). Eight years after the introduction of the IEEE 802.11p standard for vehicular communication, vehicles used on a daily basis still lack the capability of communicating with one other. This fact impedes the use of the many ITS safety applications that take advantage of VNs for data exchange. The obvious way to handle this problem is to use the available technologies at the disposal of common users to develop solutions that are easily deployable, effortless to adopt, and moreover, cost effective.
For this reason we shift our attention to smart devices, specially smartphones, which have come a long way since the first introduction of mobile phones in the late 20th century. Nowadays, nearly everyone carries one in their pocket anywhere they go, allowing them to not only make calls, but also to measure and monitor different parameters with the help of the many on-board sensors that are available to these compact yet powerful devices. Our objective is to study the effects of integrating smartphones to vehicular networks, to develop ITS safety applications. The choice of smartphones here is not only justified by their wide availability and use, but also because they are evolving towards high performance terminals with multi-core microprocessors packed with a sufficiently diverse group of sensors. In this thesis we propose three different ITS safety applications for smartphones, designed to take advantage of the vehicular network environment: a warning generation application called Messiah that alerts drivers of the presence of emergency vehicles in close proximity; a FCW application which warns drivers if a minimum safe distance is not maintained between the vehicle ahead and the one following it; and lastly an application that aims to aid drivers with visual assistance while overtaking, named EYES. All these applications have been developed for the Android platform, and are dependent on the data transmission among vehicles. Since vehicles we use on a day to day basis still do not accommodate the possibility to communicate with one another, we also designed the GRCBox, which is a low cost on-board unit that supports V2X communication.
From our study of applications for mobile devices designed for VNs, we found that the use of smartphones provides a new direction to research related to ITS and VNs by allowing a quick adoption of the existing solutions, where users are able to download and use applications just by one click of a button. But at the same time, the portability and compactness of the devices makes them limited in terms of speed, processing power, and accuracy of the on-board sensor, thus affecting the performance of the applications. In our case, the simpler Messiah application performed very well, while the EYES application that is dependent on GPS data, and the FCW application which required heavy processing and use of the camera due to its dependence on plate recognition, were affected by the hardware limitations of the smartphones.
